General election 2017: Theresa May struggles to defend 'dementia tax' U-turn in BBC interview – as it happened

Jeremy Corbyn is speaking in Scarborough. He says this is the 52nd event that he has done, and he says all the time the crowds he is attracting are getting bigger and bigger.

Here are the tables for the latest Guardian/ICM poll (pdf).

Here is the headline George Osborne selected for the first edition of the Evening Standard.

His second edition splash headline is considerably sharper. (Good job Theresa May claims she hardly ever reads it - see 10.34am.)

There is no one alive who knows more about British elections than Sir David Butler, who has just joined Twitter, despite being in his 90s. He says today’s U-turn is unprecedented.

22 May 201709.20 EDT

Jessica Elgot

Several local Conservative activists who attended the Welsh Conservative manifesto launch at the memorial hall in the village of Gresford told reporters afterwards that they were pleased to see the robust questioning of the prime minister on social care.

One local activist, who did not want to be named, said he thought the policy was imbalanced. “I’ve had family die of dementia and of cancer. I’ve also worked all my life to pass on what I’ve worked for to my children. I’d be devastated if it all had to go on care after I die, but this way it’s a lottery,” he said. “It does seem like the balance isn’t quite right.”

22 May 201709.17 EDT

Severin Carrell

The Scottish Labour party has predicted that Holyrood would be at least £3bn better off if Jeremy Corbyn boosted public spending after the general election.

Kezia Dugdale, the party’s Scottish leader, said electing a Corbyn government would lead to a transformation and “massive investment” in public services as she launched Labour’s Scottish manifesto in Edinburgh.

Party officials handed out a detailed breakdown of Corbyn’s manifesto pledges to spend at least £42bn, chiefly on policies for England and Wales such as abolishing tuition fees, scrapping the public sector pay cap and expanding free childcare.

They said that under the Treasury’s spending formula developed by Lord Barnett, that would see £3.1bn in so-called “Barnett consequentials” flow to the Scottish parliament over the lifetime of the next UK government.

In an explicit endorsement of Corbyn’s spending pledges, Dugdale appealed to Scottish National party voters to back Labour’s plan for what she said would be a fairer, more equal country.

Dugdale publicly opposed Corbyn’s leadership bids, and mentioned him by name once in her 2,500 word speech, but she described the party’s manifesto as “bold, ambitious and radical [in] the finest traditions of the Labour movement”.

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We’ve got a new, daily election podcast. Here is today’s, featuring Jonathan Freedland, Owen Jones and Zoe Williams.

Four polls come out at the weekend, and they all showed the Conservative lead over Labour narrowing after the publication of the manifesto. The figures were widely seen as evidence that the Tory social care plans had backfired (presumably by Theresa May too, given her announcement today.)

We’ve now got the results of this week’s Guardian/ICM survey, and it also shows Labour making advances. Here are the figures.

Conservatives: 47% (down 1 from Guardian/ICM last week)

Labour: 33% (up 5)

Lib Dems: 9% (down 1)

Ukip: 4% (down 2)

Greens: 2% (down 1)

Conservative lead: 14 points (down 6)

Martin Boon, ICM’s director, says these figures support claims Labour won the manifesto battle. Here is his take on the figures:

After the delivery of the party manifestos, polling over the weekend has indicated a resurgent, if still rather distant Labour party. ICM has been the stickiest pollster for the Tories, and while we probably still are, our poll today reinforces the impression that Labour have won the short-term manifesto battle. They rise to 33%, up five points on last week, while the Tories drop a point to stand on (a still heady) 47%.

The Tories have had a flat out bad weekend, and the wind does feel as if it’s suddenly blowing in a different direction, but we’ve seen short-term effects like this before, and we’ve seen them dissipate. This is still a massive 14-point Tory lead, and still their election to throw away.

It is almost a whole year since ICM last saw Labour on 33% (June 2016), so it’s a surge that has been a long time coming. However, it does not arise in conjunction with a precipitous Tory collapse, and their 47% remains a number that the party will be wholly delighted with. Electoral Calculus predict an overall majority of 134, with the Tories only just shy of 400 seats. Labour do recover to 177, largely because their polling in their own marginal seats is much improved: a deficit of only three points compared to 17-20 points that we have seen in such places on ICM’s recent polls. It’s a step in the right direction.

Ukip drop to 4%, the lowest online share we have ever allocated to the party. This is partly the result of a methodology change. ICM is able to systematically allocate every respondent to their political constituency via their full postcode, so this week we built into the interview software constituency-level information that precluded Ukip as a party to vote for in those seats where they are not standing a candidate (thus forcing people living in such places to make an alternative choice). We believe this is a good addition to our polling methods; it will explain part of the further Ukip drop but perhaps not all of it.

ICM interviewed 2,004 adults aged 18+ online, on 19-21 May 2017. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

UPDATE: Here are the tables for the poll (pdf).

According to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the Tories are now claiming they never ruled out a cap on social care costs - only the Dilnot version of the cap.

At the last election the Tories promised to implement the recommendation from the Dilnot commission for a cap on social care costs (although at a level much higher than that originally proposed by Andrew Dilnot). But after the election David Cameron’s government said implementation would be delayed until 2020. Last week’s manifesto implied that the Dilnot plans were dead, but today’s announcement suggests they may get a new lease of life.

In its manifesto Labour proposed increasing the social care budget by £8bn over the course of the next parliament.

The manifesto also says Labour would impose a cap on the maximum amount people have to pay for their care, as well as raising the “floor”, the sum people are allowed to keep when all their assets have been used up. Today’s announcement means that the Tories have now on these issues effectively adopted Labour policy.

Labour said their plans would cost £3bn a year. The Tories have not costed their version.

This is from the Labour manifesto.

In its first years, our service will require an additional £3bn of public funds every year, enough to place a maximum limit on lifetime personal contributions to care costs, raise the asset threshold below which people are entitled to state support, and provide free end of life care. There are different ways the necessary monies can be raised. We will seek consensus on a cross-party basis about how it should be funded, with options including wealth taxes, an employer care contribution or a new social care levy.